Quotes About Contemplation

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for 5 seconds and think for 10 minutes.

Life has a higher end, than to be amused.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say.

...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Philosophy is for the few.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Blaise Pascal: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

We would all pass for such as have the true faith and not the false. But, be not your own judges; appeal to the Spirit of God, and let him, with the sword of his word, come and decide the controversy. Which faith is thine, the true or false?

Prayer is a solemn work as any thou canst go about in thy whole lifetime.

I keep [a] subject constantly before me," Newton once remarked, "and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.

All that could happen was alone with me and I was alone with it.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

My job is to bore you and let the hardness of your seat and the warmth of your robe prepare you for what is to come.

There is an art of which every man should be a master the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.

I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me.